It's two weeks before the release of Titanic,
and an enormous sense of relief is apparent on James Cameron's tightly
drawn face. And why not? After three years of relentless toil, his $200
million gamble is no longer just the most expensive movie ever made--it's
his favorite, and the critics seem to like it as much as he does.

Suddenly, nobody seems to care whether Titanic
will earn its money back. Cameron, the acclaimed action auteur of Aliens,
True
Lies, and the Terminator movies, has used modern special effects
technology in the service of good old-fashioned storytelling to make something
new out of the best-known disaster tale of the century. Leonardo DiCaprio
and Kate Winslet star as lovers aboard the "unsinkable" British luxury
liner that collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic early on the
morning of April 15, 1912. The Titanic--lovingly and painstakingly recreated
in the film--sank two hours later, and more than 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers
died.

Cameron, forty-three, actually backed into the
Titanic story a decade ago. While researching deep-sea submersible systems
for his film The Abyss, he met explorer Robert Ballard, leader of
the crew that had recently located the Titanic wreckage off the coast of
Newfoundland. Sufficiently inspired, Cameron took two deep-sea submersibles
to the Atlantic floor in 1995, and brought back wrenching footage of the
real Titanic wreckage that appears on-screen in the movie's present-day
framing device. All told, he made twelve grueling dives--many of them lasting
fifteen to seventeen hours--and logged more hours on the Titanic than the
passengers did back in 1912.

Upon returning to the surface, the notorious perfectionist
performed every major function on the film, earning screenwriting, producing,
directing, and editing credits, and even drawing a portrait of Winslet
that plays a crucial role in the story. Over the past year, he had only
two days off: New Year's Day, and the day last September when he married
actress Linda Hamilton, his fourth wife. As payment, he received only his
six-figure writing fee, having forfeited directing and producing checks
in an effort to keep studio funding flowing.

Relaxing in a suite at a posh Beverly Hills hotel,
Cameron tells Mr. Showbiz that all the toil paid off--Titanic,
he feels, represents the high-water mark of his career. "All my films are
love stories," says the filmmaker, "but in Titanic I finally got
the balance right. It's not a disaster film. It's a love story with a fastidious
overlay of real history."

How did your journey to the bottom of the Atlantic
to film the Titanic's wreckage change your conception of the story you
were making?

It was sort of like going to Mecca first, and
getting religion. We went there with very specific objectives, and I took
two things away from the experience. One, get it right. Do it exactly
right. We've got the real ship on film--everything else has
to live up to that level of reality from this point on. That imbued everybody
in the art department with the same kind of crusade of correctness. And
that applied also to what boats were launched at what time, what officer
was where. The whole physical staging of it was also influenced. But there
was another level of reaction coming away from the real wreck, which was
that it wasn't just a story, it wasn't just a drama. It was an event that
happened to real people who really died. Working around the wreck for so
much time, you get such a strong sense of the profound sadness and injustice
of it, and the message of it. You think, "There probably aren't going to
be many filmmakers who go to Titanic. There may never be another one--maybe
a documentarian." So it sort of becomes a great mantle of responsibility
to convey the emotional message of it--to do that part of it right, too.

What did you think of the 1958 Titanic film,
A
Night to Remember? Did that show you how not to do your story?

Yeah. But I liked Night to Remember. I
admire the film, but it is an earnest retelling of the historical event.
It would not have been satisfying for me to do Night to Remember,
or to just change the emphasis and do more on certain historical figures
on the ship. I wanted to do something very different. I mean, Gone With
the Wind is not about the burning of Atlanta. The Civil War is the
backdrop for that, and the sinking of the Titanic is the backdrop for this
story. You can learn a lot of Titanic history from [my] film. All of the
historical stuff is done absolutely rigorously and correctly. We didn't
take any liberties just because it's a fictional story at its core. Even
the story of Jack and Rose is entirely permissible on the ship. The car
they go into in the hold to make love? That car was there. It was a red
35-horsepower Renault car owned by William E. Carter and insured for $2,500,
which he did collect. As far as we know, it's still down there. Maybe I'm
just amusing myself, maybe it's entirely masturbatory, but I was trying
to find a way to tell a fictional story within very rigid confines of known
history.

You earned a six-figure fee for the Titanic
screenplay you did three years ago, but gave up your salary and potential
profit points. Why?

The answer to that is very complex, but the short
version is that the film cost proportionally much more than T2 and
True
Lies. Those films went up seven or eight percent from the initial budget.
Titanic
also had a large budget to begin with, but it went up a lot more. As the
producer and director, I take responsibility for the studio that's writing
the checks, so I made it less painful for them. I did that on two different
occasions. They didn't force me to do it; they were glad that I did.

One of many emotionally moving moments in Titanic
occurs when Ruth [Frances Fisher] is tying on her daughter Rose's [Kate
Winslet's] corset, and gives it a final pull. It's a powerful visual metaphor
for the suffocating world Kate feels trapped in. Was that idea on the page,
or did it come out of the direction?

It's interesting, because on the page Rose was
helping her mother dress, and the mother had her back to her and was talking
to her. I'd written it that way, but the night or morning before shooting
the scene, I thought, "I should switch this." I got everybody all freaked
out, because I said, "I want Kate in the corset." The wardrobe people all
flipped out, because she was never supposed to be seen in her corset. I
said, "This is really important; we have to do it this way." The lines
stayed exactly the same, but the emphasis changed so much. Those are the
great discoveries that you make when you're actually taking theory and
turning it into practice.

It helps that you're not only the writer, but
also the director.

Yes, but the way the Hollywood system works, a
lot of directors probably wouldn't have done that, because the studio had
approved the script. But, for me, writing is just part of the directing
process. The writing is one draft, the shooting is the next draft, and
the editing is the last draft.

The costumes play a big role in Titanic
from the audience's perspective. Did they also impact the performances
you got from your actors?

A lot of the women's performances on this film
were informed by the fact that they were wearing corsets. When Frances
[Fisher] was looping [re-recording] the picture, she had a hard time recreating
her level of performance--Ruth wasn't coming back to her. So we redid part
of the looping, and I told her to bring her corset with her. They hadn't
let her wear it before, because the bones in the corset were making noise.
I said, "Screw the noise. Put the corset on." The second she did, she went
back into character. Part of the bearing, the propriety, of her character
came from that.

Given the repression of this corseted world,
the scene in which Jack [Leonardo DiCaprio] draws Rose naked carries a
powerful erotic charge.

The scene's very innocent, very tame.

But it still carries quite a charge in comparison
with what came before.

Exactly, because you understand the repression
that's the backdrop. Because it's behind closed doors, and it's their secret
place, and they're surrounded by all this elegance--this sort of baroque
elegance of that period. But it's the repression. You know what it means
for her, the freedom she must be feeling. It's kind of exhilarating for
that reason.

At what stage of the filming did you do those
intimate scenes between Kate and Leo? Did the actors have time to get to
know each other?

This was the beauty of it: The nude scene where
he draws her, that was the first scene they did together. It wasn't by
any kind of design, although I couldn't have designed it better. There's
a nervousness and an energy and a hesitance in them. They had rehearsed
together, but they hadn't shot anything together. If I'd had a choice,
I probably would have preferred to put it deeper into the body of the shoot.
We were just trying to find things to shoot because our big set wasn't
ready. We were supposed to start with our day exteriors up on the big Titanic
set. It wasn't ready for months, so we were scrambling around trying to
fill in anything we could get to shoot. It was horrible. But having seen
how it worked, I think it worked out very well for the scene.

How did Leo and Kate get along on the set,
and how was it to work with them?

Leo's a real cut-up on the set. He blows off a
lot of steam. In between takes, he's always goofing around. Kate tends
to be very serious and very focused: "We're here to do a job, and we're
very disciplined, and I'm thinking about my character." Leo would just
come over and do something so outrageous, something so gross it would crack
her up. Then she'd get angry and punch him. But he would keep going, to
the point where she was in tears laughing. It was so necessary that he
would do that for her, because it was such a microcosm of what their characters
were like. His character is constantly functioning as a kind of catharsis
for her, releasing her from herself--from the cage that she's been put
in by social influences. So then they'd come into the scene, and they'd
have that energy.

How much of Leo is in Jack?

I'm sorry that Leo doesn't do more interviews,
because I'd like people to see who he is, to see that Jack was a
creation, and not just . . . Leo. He's done these kind of off-beat characters
in the past, and people might make the assumption that we're just seeing
the raw guy. But it's not. He's as much of a creation as any of his other
characters. Once Leo's on, he's very serious. He's absolutely disciplined,
and so is Kate. We got along great, because we're all perfectionists, all
in different ways.

Working with actors who are that good is what
I love most about filmmaking. A lot of [filmmaking] is a big headache.
Most of making a big film like this is just a giant pain in the butt. But
working with people that good is where your heart really soars. You're
part of a real-time act of creation. You never could have predicted exactly
what it would be, and here it is happening right in front of you. Yet you're
a participant in it.

Your actors have said that you knew exactly
what you wanted on the set. That obviously has its advantages, but as a
director, don't you have to stay a little bit flexible too?

That's the hardest thing to do on a big technical
film, because the more you can plan in advance, the better. And the more
decisions you've made before you ever get to the set, the better. But you
have to stay open to the moments of discovery. You have to keep your heart
open to the magic. The first thing I'll do when I come onto the set is
I'll say, "Okay, guys, I want to own the set with my cast." I shoo off
the whole crew, even though they're on the clock. It's getting into the
set, and seeing, what's the difference if she comes through the door before
he does? Where is she going to walk in the room, and how is that going
to affect the staging and blocking? Does the scene play like that? Or does
it play better with the same dialogue where they're across the room from
each other? Some of those things you know from rehearsal. But you can't
really get it until you're there--in the set, in the moment, in costume.

You built the Titanic almost to scale: 775
feet long. Why "almost"?

Ah, what's another couple of million dollars,
right? The point is that it's a couple of million dollars that could go
into other places. I knew it wouldn't serve the film to do it. First of
all, our lot wasn't big enough. We didn't have infinite space. Everything
would grow incrementally. The track for the crane would have to be longer,
the tank would have to be bigger, more gallons of water would have to be
heated. Plus, you can't tell, because we didn't scale the whole ship down
ten percent. What we did, if you imagine that the Titanic was a loaf of
Wonder Bread, we took out that slice and that slice and that slice, and
pushed it together. So it's still as tall and as wide as the real Titanic.

From whom did you inherit your legendary work
ethic? Was your dad a tough taskmaster?

My dad's a workaholic. [Laughs.] My mother
raised five kids, so she was busy. I don't know. I was just always industrious.
It must be genetic, because when I was a kid, I'd round up all the neighborhood
kids and we'd build something--a tree house or an underground fort or a
go-cart. I could always get people to enlist in the service of an idea.
I was always very industrious.

On Titanic, news reports had you sleeping
one or two hours on some nights. Is that true? And how many hours do you
sleep when you're in a normal mode?

In normal mode, I sleep eight hours a night. When
I'm shooting, if I get less than 6 and a half, I'm screwed. So I usually
try to go for seven. I'm kind of a sleep sissy that way. I gotta have my
down time. Most people think I probably get two hours sleep a night, and
I'm constantly on.

The press also reported that you were taking
vitamin B shots during the filming.

I did. Once a week I got shot in the butt, and
I made my first assistant director do it as well. It's a stamina game.
If you get sick, you're doomed. Anybody else on the whole production can
get sick--we can even fill in for the actors, and shoot other scenes. But
if I get sick, the train stops. We also drank this green stuff. I called
it pond scum, but it was wheat grass extract.

And it worked?

I didn't get sick. The Mexican B-12 shots hurt.
Your butt ached for six hours afterwards. It was a little turbo for your
immune system. Some people debate the effectiveness, and maybe it's more
a placebo effect than anything.

So those reports of long, brutal hours of shooting
were false?

This whole myth about how we worked eighteen-hour
days is impossible. We'd shoot between twelve and fourteen hours, with
fourteen the absolute maximum. I'd have an hour of production meetings
and walking the set to figure out what we were going to do the next day.
Then, I'd have at least an hour of dailies. And then there's transit to
and from the set. Then I'd usually have an hour of decompression: non-Titanic
time for myself.

There are several breathtaking transitions
in Titanic. For instance, going back to 1912, from Old Rose's [Gloria
Stuart's] face to Rose's [Winslet's]--

Transitions are everything. They're especially
important in a film like this, where you are going back and forth in time,
through memory, or through a character. She's your doorway into the past.
You have more time to be creative when you're writing. You have months
to sit and think of these images. On the set, you've got to go in knowing
what you're going for.

Did the fact that Titanic must reach
a tremendous mass audience make you compromise your vision at any time?

The biggest act of compromise when you're making
a piece of populist filmmaking is that there's a certain intellectual depth
of idea that you cannot explore freely in the way that you could in a novel.
Or if you want to take ten pages, or twenty or a hundred, and make an excursion
deep into a person's past or psyche, you can't do that. We pretty much
pushed the limit on this film of how much time you can spend on character
in mainstream filmmaking.

Your attention to historical detail is impeccable,
but you did choose to omit what some might call a crucial historical fact--the
ship that was close to the Titanic, but had turned off its radio for the
night and didn't hear their SOS calls. Why?

Yes, the Californian. That wasn't a compromise
to mainstream filmmaking. That was really more about emphasis, creating
an emotional truth to the film. There are a lot of aspects of the classical
telling of Titanic that I thought were important in pre- and post-production,
but turned out, as the film evolved, to be less important. The story of
the Californian was in there; we even shot a scene of them switching off
their Marconi radio set. But I took it out. It was a clean cut, because
it focuses you back onto that world. If Titanic is powerful as a
metaphor, as a microcosm, for the end of the world in a sense, then that
world must be self-contained. The Californian was a dead end; it could
have been a player, but it wasn't, you know what I mean? Ultimately, it
wasn't important.

In a way, Titanic is a parable about
the dangers of trusting blindly in technology. What's the next Titanic
disaster awaiting us?

We're due for a big shock soon. There are areas
that we know are dangerous, with respect to nuclear power, biological weapons,
and maybe, to a certain extent, genetic research. But we utterly and completely
embrace the silicon chip. We've let computers become a fabric of our life.
We don't yet know the long-term impact of that. History has shown that
every technology brings a curse with it. The lesson of Titanic is, just
don't go so fast when you're dealing with that much power and energy, the
kinetic energy of a ship that weighs 48,000 tons. Give yourself time to
turn, because that's all they did wrong.

Tell me about casting the long-retired thirties
film star Gloria Stuart as Old Rose, the one living survivor of the Titanic.

My casting director found her. She was sent out
on a mission to find retired actresses from the Golden Age of the thirties
and forties. Gloria was a leading lady for a couple of years, but she hasn't
emerged as one of our really big, memorable stars. I honestly didn't really
know who she was. There were a lot of names on the list that were recognizable.
At that point, we were going, "Oh, my God, is she still alive? Is she still
working?" It was exciting to meet Fay Wray, who was one of the contenders.
But Gloria was just so into it, and so lucid, and had such a great spirit.
And I saw the connection between her spirit and Kate's spirit. I saw this
joie
de vivre in both of them, that I thought the audience would be able
to make that cognitive leap that it's the same person. Gloria's a pistol.
She can play the grande dame, but every once in a while she'll lapse. Her
husband wrote for Groucho Marx for many years. She's kind of a gutter-mouth,
so we got along fine.

Where did your love of filmmaking come from?

My formative years as a film fan, the most vivid
times, were in the sixties, when I was a teenager. It was really whatever
was playing that week, everything from Woodstock to Easy Rider
to Catch-22 to 2001. It was a real mélange of the
start of independent filmmaking and the tail end of epic filmmaking. It
was whatever worked for me. It's only later that I'm able to classify these
films and put them into their proper "family tree" of film aesthetics and
influences.

A film that affected me a lot when I was eighteen
or nineteen was Dr. Zhivago. A lot of people don't consider that
Lean's best film, but it was my first David Lean film on the big screen.
It's still a stunning movie. So if there's any sense of conscious emulation,
or setting the bar high, it would be Lean. But I didn't get there with
this film [Titanic]. I might never get there, but you gotta set
the goal high, so that when you fail, you're failing at a higher level.

Do you believe in film schools as a training
ground for young filmmakers?

One of the best things that happened to me was
that I didn't go to film school. I used to go down to the USC library and
read everything. I'd Xerox stuff. I made my own reference library of doctoral
dissertations on optical printing and all that. I really studied technical
stuff formally. But I didn't study film aesthetics because I figured it
becomes too solipsistic. It's just about other movies. You need training;
you need mentoring. And you need life experience. I was living life for
a few years, hanging out with my druggie buddies down in Orange County,
and studying physics and doing a lot of reading and traveling. So you have
something to say, and some real-world experience that's not just based
on other movies.

The main thing is just picking up a camera and
making a film. That's the most important thing. People say, "How do you
get to be a filmmaker?" I say, "Go home, pick up your video camera, and
make a film." Well, it's on video, it doesn't matter. But it's an image;
you're deciding what goes into that image. People say, "Well, where am
I gonna get the money?" Fuck the money. Get some people and just make a
film. Because if you make a film and you put your name on it that says
"Directed by," even if it's the worst piece of crap in the world and cost
no money, everything after that, you're a director. You're just haggling
over your price, you know what I mean? [Laughs.] And the budget.
It scales up from there, but you've defined yourself in that role. If you
can't define yourself in that role to yourself, then you're just chippin'
away at it, not really doing it.

Earlier in your career, you worked with Roger
Corman, who once remarked that if someone worked for him on three pictures,
they were probably no good.

Exactly, right. Well, I only did two. [Laughs.]
I got out of there in time.

What did you think of Alien Resurrection?

It has some fun moments in it. It wasn't scary.
I read an interview with the director the other day, and he made such an
amazing comment: "I've never understood how someone can be afraid in a
cinema." Hey, dude! Then don't do an Alien movie! What the hell
was he thinkin'? But I admire the film visually, and I think Sigourney's
awesome. It just wasn't scary, which sort of misses the point to me.

What can you say about Avatar, your
upcoming project with a cast of entirely digitally generated stars?

They're non-human characters. If we weren't doing
them with computer graphics, we would do them with makeup, or some other
form of visual effect. So it's not taking the place of anybody. It's an
entirely market-driven process. When we did T2, we introduced new
visual effects ideas. People loved it; it proved itself.

Are you going to do Avatar next?

That's a possibility, but I haven't decided what
to do next. T3 is not a possibility. Spiderman is a remote
possibility, if we can get the rights corralled in one place. It's a big
legal mess right now.

Why is another Terminator sequel out?

I just decided not to do it. I want to go into
new areas of visualization. Spiderman is new for me, and it's something
I've loved since I was a kid, and I wrote a script for it that I like.